Lots of talk for homeless, verging on action

While other major cities have cut their homeless populations by 70% or more in recent years, San Diego’s unsheltered have jumped more than 50%. There's been a lot of talk of fixing the problem, but residents of East Village won't believe talk untill they see action.

While other major cities have cut their homeless populations by 70% or more in recent years, San Diego’s unsheltered have jumped more than 50%. There's been a lot of talk of fixing the problem, but residents of East Village won't believe talk untill they see action.

There is fresh reason to hope that San Diego really can solve its homeless crisis, arresting the moral and political decline that has made us a national disgrace.

Having emerged from their silos in business, government and philanthropy, some of the women and men who run the city are gearing up.

To be clear, most of the progress so far amounts to talk; lots of great meetings, a few pretty renderings. But that’s OK, right? In a democracy, talk is the essential wellspring of action.

Try telling that to Juanita Broughman, who over 22 years as a resident of San Diego’s East Village — half of them homeless — has become an expert witness to personal catastrophe.

“There’s got to be a remedy, something’s got to be done,” she said Thursday, lecturing from her scooter with all the passion and fluency of a tent city Huey Long. “This is like the Great Depression.”

Broughman is one of the lucky ones. For the last 11 years she has lived in a subsidized apartment under the care of Father Joe’s Villages, a nonprofit that houses 1,800 people on a given day.

Less fortunate was the 81-year-old man who said he was wounded in Korea. After a gentle security guard interrupted a sidewalk nap near the entrance to Father Joe’s, the old man told me he’d been living outside for more than a year. He declined to give his name, explaining that he didn’t want to bring shame to his family.

Across the street, Sandra Carel sat in a wheelchair. Our conversation wandered in ways that left me impossibly behind, yet I did gather that she was permanently disabled and on a waiting list for housing.

Carel was crystal clear about one thing: “I don’t want to live on the street.”

Yet that’s generally where she’s been for three years, off and on. To our great shame, she had plenty of company.

Over the last decade, as major cities like Houston have reduced their homeless populations by 75 percent or more, San Diego County’s unsheltered count soared by 58 percent to 4,658 people, according to the latest federal data.

Make no mistake, these people are suffering. Homeless deaths have doubled since 2014, with 117 dying without dignity last year on our streets, canyons and parks.

The cause is simple. Other cities build and buy modest apartment units, and then hand over keys and offer services to their most vulnerable, disabled people.

San Diego has effectively done the opposite. Over the last six years, officials have allowed 10,000 units of its cheapest housing to disappear — in violation of city law — bulldozed for condos or converted to boutique hotels.

For perspective, the city’s housing commission has helped fund construction of just 615 new apartments dedicated for the homeless since 2005.

Such failures have left San Diego in a deep hole. However, with public outrage building, our leaders may be getting tired of digging.

Last week, Mayor Kevin Faulconer proposed to raise hotel taxes, through a November ballot initiative that would guarantee funding for the homeless, expand the convention center and maintain roads.

Meanwhile, the city’s Housing Our Heroes program of landlord incentives has put 630 homeless veterans (using mostly federal Department of Veteran’s Affairs funds) — into apartments over the last year, and rent vouchers into the hands of 320 more. It’s a proven strategy that has worked cheaply and efficiently in other cities.

“The next step is expanding this beyond veterans,” said Stacie Spector, the mayor’s special adviser on homelessness, who is also pushing to expand a family reunification program and beef up a regional data sharing system.

A week earlier, Father Joe’s unveiled a grand plan to raise $531 million in public and private funding to build and buy 2,000 units for the homeless in five years. Roughly a third would rise downtown as new construction, and the rest from renovating old motels throughout the city.

The project faces competition for funding, neighborhood opposition and donor fatigue. Still, advocates now have a bold campaign by a major nonprofit to rally behind.

Yet it’s the private, quiet efforts that could ultimately deliver the fundamental change that San Diego needs.

In one prominent example, Peter Seidler, managing partner of the San Diego Padres, and hard-charging businessman Dan Shea have organized executives, academics and philanthropists into a loose network that seems to be steadily expanding its reach.

Their short-term goal is finding locations for emergency beds to reverse recent losses. In the longer run, they want to understand and improve the entire private-public ecosystem that serves the homeless. This couldn’t be more ambitious.

“I’m optimistic that the homeless problem in San Diego is going to peak and only get better from here,” Seidler said last week. “There will always be homeless people, but I do believe the city will be best-in-class and getting better in all the significant areas.”

They’ve enlisted retired accountants to crack the books of county and city government to identify the myriad sources and destinations of state, federal and local funds.

They are talking to all three major universities about forming institutes, curricula and internships to train future leaders of key nonprofits and government agencies.

In the private equity world, you can dramatically improve outcomes by recruiting top talent, overhauling corporate governance and adopting the best ideas of competitors. Why should caring for the homeless be any different?

“We have to break this into a thousand pieces and find people who are passionate about every piece … and hopefully champion some successes,” Shea said last week.

To that end, the group is holding private symposiums of experts and decision-makers hosted by the University of San Diego with the support of its president, Jim Harris. Students and faculty of USD’s Burnham-Moores Center for Real Estate are hatching a project to evaluate property throughout the county for potential to house the homeless.

Another goal is to increase philanthropy, in part by better measuring results so the generous can know their dollars are really helping people.

Solving the crisis will require both kinds of leadership you see in business and government.

Politicians, against all their instincts, must measure their efforts against hard numbers — we will house X people by Y date — instead of merely boosting funding here, adding staff there, and holding a press conference.

Similarly, the private sector will fail if it doesn’t respect the public process. You can’t jam a homeless project into a community without plenty of conversation.

And both kinds of leadership muscle will be required to move the bureaucracies built up over years inside the local institutions that brought us this crisis.

One telling example involves San Diego’s vacant, former central library, which is among several large locations being evaluated for emergency beds. By way of preface, the search enjoys the full support of Faulconer, the mayor, and Ron Roberts, the city’s representative on the county board of supervisors.

Over the course of several weeks this winter, city staff came up with four distinct stories about why homeless people couldn’t be temporarily housed at the old library.

Officials variously said it wasn’t insured, lacked sprinklers and had asbestos, impediments that governments fix or waive all the time. But the topper was an alleged shortcoming of “load-bearing floors,” in a building that held tons of books for decades. The library is still empty.

Such creativity in rejecting solutions returns me to the basic point so eloquently espoused by Broughman, the formerly homeless woman who worries about her fellows in blighted East Village.

“There has to be a cure. Where are these people going to go when this is all redeveloped?” she said, waving her hand toward the luxury apartment towers rising above a sea of misery. “Don’t just tell people what’s wrong with them, give them dignity.”

It’s easy to wonder what’s wrong with the homeless. But the real question has always been this: What’s wrong with San Diego? Now a few leaders of conscience and courage, inside and outside of government, are asking hard questions, and seeking answers.

CAPTION

San Diego has agreed to sell 16 lots in Nestor for $1 each, in the pursuit of affordable housing. The nonprofit San Diego Community Land Trust plans to build three and four-bedroom homes there for people with moderate incomes. That means a family of five with an income of up to $102,750.

San Diego has agreed to sell 16 lots in Nestor for $1 each, in the pursuit of affordable housing. The nonprofit San Diego Community Land Trust plans to build three and four-bedroom homes there for people with moderate incomes. That means a family of five with an income of up to $102,750.

CAPTION

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San Diego has agreed to sell 16 lots in Nestor for $1 each, in the pursuit of affordable housing. The nonprofit San Diego Community Land Trust plans to build three and four-bedroom homes there for people with moderate incomes. That means a family of five with an income of up to $102,750.

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